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Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and his deputy Ken Cuccinelli have talked about immigrants taking American jobs, blasted Democrat-run sanctuary cities, touted “America First” and warned of “evil people who seek to travel to the United States with the intent of harming and killing Americans.”

In Phoenix last week, Wolf warned that there would be a surge in migration and an “unimaginable public health crisis” at the southern border if Trump were to lose the election — a series of nakedly political statements that stunned many former officials.

“The rhetoric that’s come out of Wolf and Cuccinelli is appearing to be a propaganda arm of the White House,”

The arrests were part of “Operation OPTical Illusion,” a crackdown on the federal Optional Tactical Training program, which allows international students to work in their field of study while on a U.S. student visa.

Cuccinelli directly tied this immigration enforcement action to Trump’s agenda, saying the arrests “will open up those jobs for American workers” and emphasizing that this “has been a very high priority for this President.”

Earlier in October, ICE put up bold black and red billboards in several parts of Pennsylvania, featuring the faces of six immigrants and their charges of burglary, robbery, and assault in big lettering. The agency described them as “at-large immigration violators who may pose a public safety threat” and said the campaign was meant to “educate the public about the dangers of non-cooperation policies.

“DHS is showing us a textbook example of why we have a federal law against government officials using their positions to support a political campaign,”

The politically significant locations of these press conferences, and the presence of senior leadership, means each event has been covered by local news and circulated on social media, likely reaching their intended in-state audience and beyond.

“the Trump administration is building [a] new wall and doing so faster than ever before” and “the Trump admin is putting America first by protecting American workers.” On Thursday, Wolf posted an almost 2-minute video about news media raising questions about Trump’s promised border wall in what was effectively a campaign ad, with the message: “They said it couldn’t be done…They were wrong. 400 times and counting.”

“These billboards are clearly intended to fuel anti-immigrant fervor one month before the election,”

“Top DHS officials are acting more like campaign surrogates than public servants, and they need to be held accountable.”

“I am deeply disturbed that ICE is spending government dollars and putting lives at risk in furtherance of what is described as a political messaging campaign,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, wrote in a letter to Pham in early October.

Immigration lawyers and advocates have raised concerns the agency has also been timing other law enforcement actions for political purposes. In September, ICE announced that 19 non-citizens in North Carolina had been charged with illegally voting in the 2016 election.

This time around, the ICE announcement about the charges — which came more than three years after the investigation started — were also “highly suspect, and likely to be politically driven,” says Helen Parsonage, an attorney who represents five of the non-citizens.

While Trump’s 2016 rallies were often filled with vivid accounts of immigrant crime, “build the wall” chants and infamous readings of a poem about a snake to illustrate the threat posed by immigrants and refugees, it’s a theme he’s rarely touched on in his 2020 rallies.

Biden’s campaign yesterday announced a last blitz of advertising across five media markets in Pennsylvania, drawing upon its strong financial advantage in the homestretch. Last week Biden spent $62 million on TV and radio ads, while the Trump campaign spent only $15.5 million, according to Advertising Analytics.

Biden released a list over the weekend of 817 bundlers, his campaign’s key fund-raising supporters, shedding light on some of the sources of his war chest and drawing another line of demarcation with Trump in the process.

Biden’s list was full of Wall Street executives, power lawyers and Hollywood producers, as well as his own longtime associates.

In Texas — where the number of ballots cast by late last week had already surpassed the total vote count in 2016 — the State Supreme Court yesterday rejected a Republican effort to throw out more than 120,000 ballots that had been cast at drive-through locations in Harris County, which is heavily Democratic.

In Texas over the weekend, the president’s supporters surrounded a Biden tour bus on the highway and slowed it down to as low as 25 miles per hour, yelling as they drove and prompting the campaign to cancel two events. Trump shared a video of the incident on Twitter, writing: “I love Texas!” Last night, he added, “These patriots did nothing wrong.”

But it is part of a growing culture of escalation that has federal law enforcement officials worried about the scenes that could play out in the event of a disputed or delayed election result.

“We are very concerned about groups lurking and trying to intimidate voters in particular communities,” said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a group that works to ensure voting rights.

What that means is that Democrats, who have benefited from the state’s rising populations of college graduates, younger voters and minorities, are sure to loosen the Republican grip on power in Texas. What no one knows is by how much.

Trump demands continuous updates on the state of the race.

"It's really a contest to see whether or not we can all stand it, right?" Trump said at his frostbit event in Michigan

Increasingly, Trump's efforts on the trail amount to willing into existence the reality he'd rather be facing than the one he actually is. For him, coronavirus is a media exaggeration designed to prevent his campaign from hosting massive crowds. He insists the numbers for his rallies are bigger than ever, despite the pandemic.

Trump has not divulged to many what he might do should he lose. The delicate matter is not discussed widely among his team and has not been raised often with the President, who believes adamantly he will win.

Not one for introspection, but deeply prone to insecurity about potential failure, Trump has offered only fleeting glimpses of turmoil about potentially falling short.

"How the hell can we be tied?" Trump has asked about states where he and Biden are running neck-to-neck

He has joked he might drive an 18-wheeler into the distance, escaping the political life he chose for himself five years ago.

he has mused about fleeing overseas to escape humiliation

"I shouldn't even be here. They said I have Georgia made," Trump said later Sunday, standing beneath two fluttering American flags in a state that's voted Republican in the last six presidential elections. "But I said, I promised -- we have to be here. They said, 'Sir, you don't have to come to Georgia. It's won.' "

While he has suggested mass firings in his Cabinet should he win, he has not made his intentions explicitly known -- though by his final, muggy rally on a Miami area tarmac on Sunday night, he seemed ready to offer a hint.

If Trump does fail to win a second term -- the first president to do so in almost 30 years -- few believe he would fade into the background like his predecessors, who mostly stepped away from public life.

Trump will almost certainly continue tweeting.

After all, it is the rally where Trump has seemed most himself, even after four years of being president and ample time to adjust to a more presidential way of behaving

Ten hours and three rallies later, Trump boasted he could draw bigger crowds than his rivals, who have enlisted musical acts in the final stretch

He sounded dour and spoke for only about 20 minutes on Friday in Minnesota when rally was limited by the state's coronavirus restrictions.

Because of the pandemic, they are smaller now than they were in 2016, a fact Trump has refused to admit even as it remains patently obvious to any casual observer. Often, aides throw out numbers with little rooting in reality.

Sometimes he adds a new insult of his rivals; this weekend's addition was claiming his Democratic rival Joe Biden's signature aviator sunglasses were too small for his face and that his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, has been mispronouncing her own name.

He has not gone in for retail politics, partly because any unscheduled appearance at a restaurant or takeaway would place him squarely in the optics of coronavirus. When he stopped for pizzas in Pennsylvania in August, he seemed somewhat taken aback by the plexiglass barriers between himself and the cashier. Trump rarely, if ever, encounters voters who do not support him.

A lover of routine, Trump has spent only a handful of nights away from the White House, preferring to fly back even from late-night rallies.

On Thursday, after returning to the White House in the dark after a two-day Western swing, Trump was tweeting at 3 a.m. about the prospect of an election decided by the Supreme Court.

It isn't clear how much of his wife or teenage son he has seen lately; first lady Melania Trump has recently embarked for the first time on the campaign trail herself. All three had coronavirus last month; Trump has taken to touting his 14-year-old son Barron's infection as evidence of the mild effect on young people, suggesting he had it for either two minutes, 14 minutes or 15 minutes.

Along the way he has found some new interlocutors, including the rapper Lil Wayne, who had been in touch with the White House about Trump's plan for bolstering Black communities and was invited to meet the President at his Doral golf club

While not particularly wistful, Trump does sometimes wax nostalgic about his only previous campaign. He has assembled many of the same aides, most decades his junior, to accompany him as he attempts to repeat his victory this year. He will hold his final campaign rally on Monday evening in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the same place he held his final event in 2016.

"As soon as that election's over, we're going in with our lawyers," Trump said in North Carolina on Sunday, stopping between his second and third rallies of the day to speak with reporters as the sun set behind him.

After inviting supporters to enter a chance to win tickets to an election night party at his hotel in downtown Washington, Trump scrapped a planned appearance there. He was put off, he said, by Mayor Murial Bowser's restrictions on large gatherings.

How Trump reacts to the information coming to him about percentages of early votes and turnout numbers is anyone's guess. But no officials have ruled out Trump declaring himself the winner even in the absence of formal vote counts or media projections.

Not because it was going to help Trump win but because it was going to help Trump cope with a loss. The president was not accepting defeat. That meant no Republican with career ambitions could accept it, either.

At a low point in his party’s existence, with much of the GOP’s leadership class pre-writing their own political epitaphs by empowering Trump to lay waste to the country’s foundational democratic norms, an obscure lawyer from west Michigan stood on principle. It proved to be the nail in Trump’s coffin

Shortly after Michigan’s vote to certify, the General Services Administration finally commenced the official transition of power and Trump tweeted out a statement affirming the move “in the best interest of our Country.”

Still, the drama in Lansing raised deeper questions about the health of our political system and the sturdiness of American democracy

Why were Republicans who privately admitted Trump’s legitimate defeat publicly alleging massive fraud? Why did it fall to a little-known figure like Van Langevelde to buffer the country from an unprecedented layer of turmoil?

In conversations with more than two dozen Michigan insiders—elected officials, party elders, consultants, activists—it became apparent how the state’s conditions were ripe for this sort of slow-motion disaster

Michigan is home to Detroit, an overwhelmingly majority Black city, that has always been a favorite punching bag of white Republicans. The state had viral episodes of conflict and human error that were easily manipulated and deliberately misconstrued. It drew special attention from the highest levels of the party, and for the president, it had the potential to settle an important score with his adversary, Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer

Perhaps most important, Trump’s allies in Michigan proved to be more career-obsessed, and therefore more servile to his whims, than GOP officials in any other state he has cultivated during his presidency, willing to indulge his conspiratorial fantasies in ways other Republicans weren’t.

“Anybody can sue anybody for any reason. But winning is a whole different matter. And Trump didn’t have a realistic pathway here,” Brian Calley, the former GOP lieutenant governor, told me prior to the certification vote

“We have to see this for what it is. It’s a PR strategy to erode public confidence in a very well-run election to achieve political ends,” Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said in an interview last week. “This was not any type of valid legal strategy that had any chance at ultimately succeeding.”

Strangely liberated by his deficit of 154,000 votes, the president’s efforts here were aimed not at overturning the results, but rather at testing voters’ faith in the ballot box and Republicans’ loyalty to him.

where he can ultimately succeed—is in convincing unprecedented numbers of Americans that their votes didn’t count. Last month, Gallup reported that the public’s confidence in our elections being accurate dropped 11 points since the 2018 midterms, which included a 34-point decrease among Republicans.

That was before a daily deluge of dishonest allegations and out-of-context insinuations; before the conservative media’s wall-to-wall coverage of exotic conspiracy theories; before the GOP’s most influential figures winked and nodded at the president of the United States alleging the greatest fraud in U.S. history.

Trump failed to win Michigan. But he succeeded in convincing America that a loss, no matter how conclusive, may never again be conclusive enough.

The irony of Michigan’s electoral meltdown is that Election Day, in the eyes of veteran clerks and poll workers across the state, was the smoothest it had ever been

“You’re talking about election officials implementing new laws, running an election with a 60 percent mail vote, in the middle of a pandemic,”

“In terms of voters getting the ballots processed and counted in a reasonable time period, I thought they did a marvelous job. But it was a huge challenge.”

There’s always this rallying cry from Republicans—‘We win everywhere else, but lose Wayne County’—that creates paranoia. I still remember hearing, back on my first campaign in 2002, that Wayne County always releases its votes last so that Detroit can see how many votes Democrats need to win the state. That’s what a lot of Republicans here believe.”

The Republicans—House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey—were not interested. Spooked by Trump’s continued assault on mail voting, and aware that their own members in the Legislature were distrustful of the new “no-excuse-absentee” rules, Chatfield and Shirkey weren’t inclined to do the process any favors.

many Republicans didn’t believe the election would be terribly close to begin with

The common expectation was that the president would lose comfortably, by at least 4 or 5 points, a margin that would render any controversy about absentee voting meaningless.

Michigan Republicans were gripped by equal parts euphoria and panic. It was clear Trump was running far more competitively than they’d anticipated; he was on track to win Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, three states that tally their ballots quickly, meaning the spotlight would abruptly shift to the critical, slow-counting battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

it wasn’t until midnight that the urgency of the situation crashed over Republicans. Trump had built a lead of nearly 300,000 votes on the strength of same-day ballots that were disproportionately favorable to him. Now, with the eyes of the nation—and of the president—fixed on their state, Michigan Republicans scrambled to protect that lead.

Whitmer and Benson warned the GOP leaders that a protracted counting process, especially in the scenario of a competitive election, would invite chaos. Other states Trump carried in 2016, such as Ohio and Florida, allowed for pre-canvassing of absentee and other mail-in ballots so that voters would know which candidate carried the state on election night. Why couldn’t Michigan do the same?

Thomas had been “thrilled” with the professionalism he’d witnessed during Monday’s pre-processing session and Tuesday’s vote tabulating. Now, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, things were going sideways. Groups of Republican poll challengers were clustering around individual counting tables in violation of the rules.

“Reading these affidavits afterward from these Republican poll challengers, I was just amazed at how misunderstood the election process was to them,” Thomas chuckled. “The things they said were going on—it’s like ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what was going on. That’s what’s supposed to happen.’

His cushion over Biden had been whittled down to 70,000 votes. There remained hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots to be counted in the large, Democratic strongholds of Detroit, Lansing and Flint. The math was simply not workable for the president. Just before 9:30 a.m., Biden overtook Trump in the tally of Michigan’s votes—and suddenly, a switch flipped on the right.

After 24 hours of letting the democratic process work, Republicans around the country—watching Trump’s second term slipping through their fingers—began crying foul and screaming conspiracy. No state cornered the hysteria market quite like Michigan.

“The people outside that room were doing exactly what the law says you would eject people for doing—they were disrupting the election,” Thomas said. “Everyone else in the room—the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the ACLU, the nonpartisans—they all still had a full complement of challengers in the room. And the Republicans, by the way, had far more challengers in the room than they were entitled to.”

Truly egregious was Cox’s dishonesty. At the time of her tweet, several hundred of her party’s poll challengers, attorneys and representatives were already inside the TCF Center monitoring the count

By law, Republicans were allowed to have 134 challengers in the room, one for each tabulation table. In reality, the GOP had far more than that, according to sworn testimony from nonpartisan poll watchers inside the TCF Center. Because of the overflow, election officials ultimately decided to lock down the complex

In the days following Trump’s shameful address to the nation, two realities became inescapable to Michigan’s GOP elite. First, there was zero evidence to substantiate widespread voter fraud. Second, they could not afford to admit it publicly.

What made this behavior all the more confounding, Thomas said, is that the election was conducted more transparently than any he’d ever participated in. Each of the 134 tables had monitors placed at the end, “showing every keystroke that was made,” so that challengers could see exactly what was happening

But he came to realize that none of this mattered. Having dealt with Republican poll challengers for decades, Thomas said, it was clear the people who infiltrated TCF on Wednesday were not adequately trained or there for the right reasons.

“Unlike the people who were there Monday and Tuesday, these people Wednesday were totally unprepared. They had no idea how the system worked. They had no idea what they were there for,” Thomas said. “Many of them—not all of them, but many of them—they were on a mission. They clearly came in believing there was mass cheating going on in Detroit and they were on a mission to catch it.”

When Trump addressed the nation from the White House on Thursday night, insisting the election had been “stolen” from him, he returned time and again to alleged misconduct in Michigan’s biggest city. Detroit, he smirked, “I wouldn’t say has the best reputation for election integrity.” He said the city “had hours of unexplained delay” in counting ballots, and when the late batches arrived, “nobody knew where they came from.” He alleged that Republicans had been “denied access to observe any counting in Detroit” and that the windows had been covered because “they didn’t want anybody seeing the counting.”

All of this was a lie. Republicans here—from Ronna Romney McDaniel to Laura Cox to federal and local lawmakers—knew it was a lie. But they didn’t lift a finger in protest as the president disparaged Michigan and subverted America’s democratic norms. Why?

The true insanity was saved for Detroit. By early afternoon on Wednesday, hundreds and hundreds of Republicans had descended on the TCF Center, responding to an all-hands-on-deck missive that went out from the state party and was disseminated by local officials. Cox, the party chair, tweeted out a video of her comrades standing outside the locked-up downtown building. “Republican poll challengers blocked from entering the TCF Center in Detroit! This is egregious!” she wrote.

Tapped by the president-elect to take over the Republican National Committee—on the not-so-subtle condition that she remove “Romney” from her professional name—McDaniel morphed into an archetype of the Trump-era GOP sycophant. There was no lie too outlandish to parrot, no behavior too unbecoming to justify, no abuse of power too flagrant to enable

Longtime friends worried that McDaniel wasn’t merely humiliating herself publicly; she seemed to be changing in private. She was no longer coolly detached from the passions of politics. If anything, she was turning into a true MAGA believer.

There was some relief, then, when in recent weeks McDaniel told multiple confidants that she doubted there was any scalable voter fraud in Michigan. Nevertheless, McDaniel told friends and fellow Republicans that she needed to stay the course with Trump and his legal team. This wasn’t about indulging him, she said, but rather about demonstrating a willingness to fight—even when the fight couldn’t be won.

McDaniel’s thinking is actually quite linear. The RNC will vote in January on the position of chair. She is anxious to keep her job.

No matter how obvious the outcome—to McDaniel, to the 168 members of the RNC, maybe even to Trump himself—any indication of surrender would be unforgivable.

This is why McDaniel has sanctioned her employees, beginning with top spokesperson Liz Harrington, to spread countless demonstrable falsehoods in the weeks since Election Day. It’s why the RNC, on McDaniel’s watch, tweeted out a video clip of disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell claiming Trump “won in a landslide” (when he lost by more than 6 million votes nationally) and alleging a global conspiracy to rig the election against him.

With Trump entering the anguished twilight of his presidency, all that appears to matter for someone like McDaniel—or Cox, the state party chair, who faces an upcoming election of her own—is unconditional fidelity to the president.

Both Chatfield and Shirkey are talented and ambitious, self-grooming for future runs at higher office. Both could see the obvious problems of meeting with the president at such a precarious moment—and both could also see how spurning Trump could torpedo their careers in the GOP.

“Frankly, continuing to humor him merely excuses his role in this. The election wasn’t stolen, he blew it. Up until the final two weeks, he seemingly did everything possible to lose. Given how close it was, there is no one to blame but Trump.”

“But if they want a future within the party, it is required of them to demonstrate continued fealty. Principled conservatives who respect the rule of law and speak out suddenly find themselves outcasts in a party that is no longer about conservativism but Trumpism. Just ask once-conservative heroes like Jeff Flake, Justin Amash and Mark Sanford.”

Monica Palmer, one of the GOP canvassers, caused an uproar when she offered to certify the rest of Wayne County—precincts like Livonia—without certifying Detroit. (Livonia, which is 95 percent white, had more poll-book irregularities than Detroit, which is 80 percent Black.)

Tweeting out siren emojis, Jenna Ellis, the attorney for Trump’s campaign, announced: “BREAKING: This evening, the county board of canvassers in Wayne County, MI refused to certify the election results. If the state board follows suit, the Republican state legislator will select the electors. Huge win for @realDonaldTrump.”

the notion that legislators would under any circumstance be free to send their own partisans to the Electoral College had no basis in fact. Under Michigan statute, the only electors eligible to represent Michigan are those who will vote for the winner of the popular vote. There is no discretion for anyone—the governor, leaders of the legislature, canvassers at the county or state level—to do anything but follow the law.

“The unfortunate reality within the party today is that Trump retains a hold that is forcing party leaders to continue down the path of executing his fantasy of overturning the outcome—at their own expense,”

precautions were taken. In a savvy move, Chatfield and Shirkey prepared a letter addressing concerns over funding to deal with Covid-19 in Michigan. They also brought along their general counsels. These two maneuvers—one to soothe the outcry over Michigan lawmakers meeting with a president whose legal team was calling for them to overturn the state’s election results; the other to insulate them from improper discussions about doing exactly that—were sufficient to sidestep any major crisis.

Trump, perhaps sensing the nervous reticence of his guests, did not make the ask they feared. As the meeting went on, it became apparent to some people in the room that more than anything, Trump had called his Michigan allies to Washington to get an honest assessment of what had happened there. He wanted to know if there was any pathway to victory. They told him there was not.

“I don’t get it,” the president said, venting confusion and frustration. “All these other Republicans, all over the country, they all win their races. And I’m the only guy that loses?”

With all 83 counties boasting certified results, the only thing that stood between Joe Biden and his rightful claim to Michigan’s 16 electoral votes was certification from the state board of canvassers. In a rational political climate, this would not have been the subject of suspense. But the swirling innuendo and disinformation had long ago swept away any semblance of normalcy.

Already, one of the board’s two Republicans, Norm Shinkle, a career party fixture, had hinted he would not vote to certify the state’s result. Because the two Democrats would obviously vote in favor of certification, a manic gush of attention turned to the other Republican member, Aaron Van Langevelde.

By Sunday morning, speculation was rampant that Van Langevelde would resign from the board on Monday. This made perfect sense to Republicans and Democrats alike: Based on their fact-finding mission into the mysterious fourth board member, Van Langevelde was a bookish type, a rule follower, an obsessive student of world history (particularly the Roman Empire) who believes to his core in a conservative application of the law

He would be inclined, Lansing insiders figured, to vote in favor of certifying the results. But he would be disinclined to throw away his future in the Republican Party. A resignation from the board was his only way out.

Working off this expectation, a late lobbying blitz turned on Shinkle. In the 36 hours preceding Monday’s vote, he was inundated with calls and emails and text messages from high-ranking Republican luminaries around the state. Some, such as former congressman and House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers, urged him to certify the results in accordance with Michigan law. Others, including McDaniel and Cox and other state party figures, pleaded with Shinkle to stand his ground and insist on a two-week delay.

The response they got was universal: He would promise to “do my best,” then he would offer a litany of unsubstantiated allegations of fraud. (Not everyone bothered contacting Shinkle: That his wife served as a plaintiff’s witness in Trump’s ill-fated lawsuit against Detroit struck many people not just as a conflict of interest, but as a clear indication he would never vote to certify.)

Some Republicans didn’t want to believe it. But for others, reality began to set in. They had grown so accustomed to Republicans falling in line, bending a knee to Trumpism, that the notion of someone acting on his own personal ethic had become foreign.

But the more they learned about Van Langevelde, the more he sounded like just that type of independent thinker. Some viewed his relative youth as an asset, believing he wouldn’t risk throwing away his future in the party. What they had failed to appreciate was that young conservatives were oftentimes the most disillusioned with the party’s drift from any intellectual or philosophical mooring.

Like a good attorney, Van Langevelde meticulously questioned a number of expert guest speakers to ascertain if they had dissenting views of the board’s authority under state law. Time and again, they affirmed his position. The body did not have power to audit or investigate or recount; that could be done only by distinct bodies after certification was complete. The job of the board of state canvassers was narrowly to examine the certified results from all 83 counties and then, based on the relevant vote totals, certify a winner of Michigan’s 16 electoral votes. The one time he was challenged—by Spies, the political superlawyer representing John James’ U.S. Senate campaign—Van Langevelde calmly brushed his recommendations aside, telling Spies, “I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with you on that.”

Within minutes of Van Langevelde’s vote for certification—and of Shinkle’s abstention, which guaranteed his colleague would bear the brunt of the party’s fury alone—the fires of retaliation raged. In GOP circles, there were immediate calls for Van Langevelde to lose his seat on the board; to lose his job in the House of Representatives; to be censured on the floor of the Legislature and exiled from the party forever. Actionable threats against him and his family began to be reported. The Michigan State Police worked with local law enforcement to arrange a security detail.

ll for doing his job. All for upholding the rule of law. All for following his conscience and defying the wishes of Donald Trump.

“It took a lot of courage for him to do what he thought was right and appropriate, given the amount of pressure he was under,” said Brian Calley, the GOP former lieutenant governor, who told me days earlier that he had never heard the name Aaron Van Langevelde. “He carried himself as well as anybody I’ve seen in that type of setting, including people with decades and decades of experience. He showed an awful lot of poise.”

The name Van Langevelde is already so infamous in Michigan Republican lore that those associated with him are at risk of being branded turncoats, too.

because of the sweeping transformation of the party—not just ideologically or stylistically, but mechanically, with MAGA loyalists now installed in state and local leadership posts across the country—the question of loyalty will continue to define the Republican identity for years to come.

That contours of that identity—what it means to be a Trump Republican—have gained clarity over time. The default embrace of nationalism. The indifference to ideas as a vision for governing. The disregard for institutional norms. The aversion to etiquette and the bottomless appetite for cultural conflict. Now there is another cornerstone of that identity: The subversion of our basic democratic process.

More than any policy enacted or court vacancy filled, Trump’s legacy will be his unprecedented assault on the legitimacy of the ballot box

Future iterations of the GOP will make casual insinuations of voter fraud central to the party’s brand. The next generation of Republicans will have learned how to sow doubts about election integrity in one breath and in the next breath bemoan the nation’s lack of faith in our elections, creating a self-perpetuating justification to cast suspicion on a process that by raw numbers does not appear conducive to keeping them in power.

“This is not some whacked-out fringe,” James said in one taping. “When half the votes in our state believe we just had the most secure election in U.S. history, and the other half believe they were cheated, we have a problem.”

James is right. We do have a problem. Our elections continue to be underfunded. Our election bureaus are chronically understaffed. Our election workers are badly undertrained. Our elections are prone to a significant amount of human error—and any municipal or county clerk will tell you that concerns over not catching those errors keep them up at night.

But errors are not fraud. And when James says he’s troubled that half of Michigan’s voters feel they were cheated, he would do well to remember that he was the one telling them they got cheated in the first place.

there is no denying the advent of a pattern. Republicans in Michigan and across America have spent the past three weeks promoting baseless allegations of corruption at the ballot box, the rabid responses to which they use as justification to continue to question the fundamental integrity of our elections. It’s a vicious new playbook—one designed to stroke egos and rationalize defeats, but with unintended consequences that could spell the unraveling of America’s democratic experiment.

“By capriciously throwing around these false claims, you can’t get to the heart of a really important issue. In fact, you lose any credibility to get to the heart of that issue,”

“And by the way, if you’re going to do an audit, you’d better do it statewide. This is not just a Detroit thing. There are sloppy Republican precincts all over the state.

There is no immediate way to make Americans appreciate this distinction, no instant cure for the flagging confidence in our elections.

there are obvious incremental steps to take in the name of transparency and efficiency. First among them, acknowledged Chatfield, the Michigan House speaker, is getting rid of the rules that led to the TCF Center circus in the first place.

one of the items where we should look at other states and see how they’ve done it well, is regarding the early processing of absentee ballots. We mishandled that this year. We should have allowed for early processing. We didn’t, and it became a spectacle.

For those Republicans left to pick up the pieces in the coming legislative session, there may be little incentive for bipartisan cooperation on a subject that now divides the two party bases as starkly as gun rights or tax rates. The backlash against absentee voting from Republican constituents was already fierce; in the wake of Trump’s defeat and the TCF Center conspiracies, Republicans might find it beneficial to avoid raising the issue at all.

There is little cause for optimism. If the majority of GOP politicians couldn’t be bothered to do the easy work of debunking crackpot conspiracy theories, how likely are they to do the hard work of hardening our democracy?

“A lot of our leaders in this country ought to be ashamed of themselves,” said Thomas, the nonpartisan elections guru who kept Michigan’s governing class guessing his political affiliation for the past several decades. “They have propagated this narrative of massive fraud, and it’s simply not true. They’ve leapt from some human error to massive fraud. It’s like a leap to Never Neverland. And people are believing them.

“The people of this country really need to wake up and start thinking for themselves and looking for facts—not conspiracy theories being peddled by people who are supposed to be responsible leaders, but facts,” Thomas said. “If they’re not going to be responsible leaders, people need to seek out the truth for themselves. If people don’t do that—if they no longer trust how we elect the president of the United States—we’re going to be in real trouble.”

In the bid to lock in new rules before Jan. 20, Mr. Trump’s team is limiting or sidestepping requirements for public comment on some of the changes and swatting aside critics who say the administration has failed to carry out sufficiently rigorous analysis.

Every administration pushes to complete as much of its agenda as possible when a president’s term is coming to an end, seeking not just to secure its own legacy but also to tie the hands of any successor who tries to undo its work.

Editors’ Picks

Two main hallmarks of a good regulation is sound analysis to support the alternatives chosen and extensive public comment to get broader opinion

Administration officials said they were simply completing work on issues they have targeted since Mr. Trump took office in 2017 promising to curtail the reach of federal regulation.

If Democrats take control of Congress, they will have the power to reconsider some of these last-minute regulations, through a law last used at the start of Mr. Trump’s tenure by Republicans to repeal certain rules enacted at the end of the Obama administration.

But the Trump administration is also working to fill key vacancies on scientific advisory boards with members who will hold their seats far into the next presidential term, committees that play an important role in shaping federal rule making

But it is nonetheless pushing to have the rule finished before the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, limiting the period of public comment to 30 days, half the amount of time that agencies are supposed to offer.

Workers across the country deserve a chance to fully examine and properly respond to these potentially radical changes,

The Departments of Labor and Homeland Security are using a tactic known as an interim final rule, more typically reserved for emergencies, to skip the public comment period entirely and to immediately enact two regulations that put much tougher restrictions on work visas for immigrants with special skills. The rule change is part of the administration’s longstanding goal of limiting immigration.

The Homeland Security Department is also moving, again with an unusually short 30-day comment period, to adopt a rule that will allow it to collect much more extensive biometric data from individuals applying for citizenship, including voice, iris and facial recognition scans, instead of just the traditional fingerprint scan.

A third proposed new Homeland Security rule would require sponsors of immigrants to do more to prove they have the financial means to support the individual they are backing, including three years’ worth of credit reports, credit scores, income tax returns and bank records.

Unlike most of the efforts the administration has pushed, the rules intended to tighten immigration standards would expand federal regulations, instead of narrowing them

The Environmental Protection Agency, which since the start of the Trump administration has been moving at a high speed to rewrite federal regulations, is expected to complete work in the weeks that remain in Mr. Trump’s term on two of the nation’s most important air pollution rules: standards that regulate particulates and ozone emitted by factories, power plants, car exhaust and other sources.

almost

Mr. Trump signed an executive order last year directing the Transportation Department to enact the rule within 13 months — even before it had been formally proposed.

The change was backed by the railroad and natural gas industry, which has donated millions of dollars to Mr. Trump, after construction of pipelines had been blocked or slowed after protests by environmentalists.

the proposal provoked an intense backlash from a diverse array of prominent public safety officials.

In the first wave, nearly 1 million children, hundreds of thousands of teachers and half-a-million mothers with babies were evacuated. The teachers were assigned groups of kids to find spaces for when their trains arrived in smaller towns and villages.

In September 1940, the predicted Nazi bombing campaign known as “the Blitz” began, and the last wave of child evacuations took place. Many well-to-do families also arranged for their children to be sent overseas to countries such as Canada, Australia and the United States.

Accommodations varied wildly. Some children were virtually adopted by host families and given love and good care. Some lived in large manors housing dozens of children and run by teachers. Many of the urban children were seeing the countryside, agriculture and farm animals for the first time, finding it both inspiring and boring.

by January 1940, nearly half of parents had brought their children home, the museum said. The health ministry put up threatening posters to discourage this. One poster depicts a mother visiting her children in the country with a ghostly Adolf Hitler over her shoulder, tempting her like Satan to “Take them back! Take them back!”

For others, the evacuation was a nightmare. Their food rations from the government were confiscated by the families they ended up with; they were put to work in fields; many were physically and sexually abused. John Abbott told the BBC he was whipped by his host family whenever he spoke and was eventually rescued by local police, bruised and bleeding.

It was after this last wave, in October 1940, that Princess Elizabeth addressed the children of Britain.

When Elizabeth turned 18 in early 1945, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, where she trained as a truck mechanic and driver. To this day, she is the only female member of the royal family to have served in the military.

In 1940, she told the children — her contemporaries — “When peace comes, remember it will be for us, the children of today, to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place.”Now 93, she said Sunday: “I hope, in the years to come, everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge. And those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any.”“Today, once again, many will feel a painful sense of separation from their loved ones,” she closed. “But now, as then, we know deep down that it is the right thing to do.”

Biden announced Harris as his choice for vice president on August 11, and in interviews, some Democratic women donors described a concerted effort to flood the campaign with cash in support of Biden's choice

Harris' sorority sisters, who have made more than 22,000 donations in increments of $19.08 -- marking the year, 1908, that Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. was founded at Howard University.

Polls show Trump consistently lagging behind Biden in surveys of women voters.

The cash infusion in August helped Biden and his aligned party committees shatter the single-month fundraising record for a presidential contender and helped fuel an advertising blitz for the former vice president as the fall campaign swung into view.

The lopsided support for the Biden-Harris ticket among female donors who give in larger amounts comes as women have stepped up their political activity more broadly. This year, a record 298 women are running in the general election for US House seats, topping the previous record of 234, set during the 2018 midterms, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

And women have contributed $2 billion to federal candidates in this cycle, surpassing the $1.3 billion they donated in 2016 when Democrat Hillary Clinton sought the presidency, according to the Center for Responsive Politics

"They realized they need to have a role and a voice because this was a place affecting their lives and the lives of their families, and they couldn't sit on the sidelines," she said.

The gap has only grown wider as Biden has outpaced the President in overall fundraising.

The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks money in politics, identifies donors' gender by applying an algorithm that compares the most popular US Census names to the names of donors reported to the Federal Election Commission

The growing influence of women donors is no accident. Donors and strategists have worked for years help direct political money to female candidates.

For instance, Electing Women Bay Area -- a "giving group" with 100 members in Northern California -- financially supports Democratic women in competitive races

"One of the things we have long stressed ... is this idea that men are used to writing the checks, and it's a muscle that has to be exercised," said Alexandra Acker-Lyons, who is Electing Women Bay Area's political director and runs her own philanthropic and political consulting firm. "Much like being a voter is a habit, being a donor is a habit."

Once it became clear that Biden intended to pick a female vice presidential nominee, some donors timed their contributions to make a big splash

"The fact that it was Kamala made it even made it even more intentional," she said, "because we were, and obviously still are, in a moment in our country where we particularly wanted to show up for a black woman nominee."

"Almost immediately, I started to see $19.08, $19.08, $19.08 on repeat," Clayton Cox, the Democratic National Committee's finance director, said of the stream of new donations that began popping up the day Harris joined the ticket.

More than 22,500 donations in increments of $19.08 have flowed into the Biden Victory Fund-- bringing in more than $430,000,

Michelle Arrington, an Atlanta attorney who pledged AKA at Howard a decade after Harris, has long supported Harris' political campaigns, dating back to her bid for California attorney general. Harris' push to promote research into uterine fibroids -- a condition Arrington has faced and that disproportionately afflicts Black women -- underscores the value of broad representation in government, she said.

But the informal movement to donate in amounts that reflects sorority's founding date was no surprise, she said. "It's indicative of the types of things we do: We'll start meetings at 12:08 or 7:08 p.m."

he repeatedly claims we have "turned the corner" on the pandemic and that it is "disappearing." Trump responded, "That's right, we have turned the corner."

Stahl said, "You called Dr. Fauci and other health officials idiots." Trump responded, "Where did I call him an idiot?"

Stahl told Trump that she couldn't believe that, after so many people who attended his White House event for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett in September got sick with the coronavirus, Trump still doesn't strongly encourage his rally attendees to wear masks.

Trump repeatedly denied that he had endorsed the idea of locking up Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

"When did I say lock her up? When did I say lock up the governor? I never said lock up the governor." After some back-and-forth with Stahl, which aired in the televised version, he said, "Lesley, that's such a vicious thing you just said. I didn't say lock up the governor of Michigan. I would never say that. Why would I say that?"

Trump promised, as he has in the past, that he will introduce a great health care plan to replace Obamacare, which he is trying to get the courts to invalidate. When Stahl asked why we haven't seen this plan, Trump said in the extended footage, "You have seen it. I've been putting out pieces all over the place."

In the extended footage, Trump also accused the Democratic governors of Pennsylvania and North Carolina of imposing a lockdown on their residents.

Trump boasted about what he described as record job creation of 11.4 million jobs in the last five months.

Defending his handling of the pandemic, Trump, in the extended footage, repeated his false claim that "2.2 million people were supposed to die."

In the extended footage, Trump again said of his travel restrictions on China and Europe: "I closed it very early from China, heavily infected, and even from Europe, heavily infected."

Trump claimed in the extended footage that, under a Biden administration, "180 million people will lose their health care" from private insurers.

Trump boasted in the extended footage about how he "terminated" Obamacare's individual mandate, saying that this "actually makes Obamacare not Obamacare."

We counted at least 16 false or misleading claims in the extended footage Trump posted, 10 of them pandemic-related.

Trump claimed in the extended footage, "I'm saving suburbia. He's gonna destroy suburbia. He's got a regulation, which I terminated, that he would put back, and even worse, that will destroy -- that will bring low-income housing projects into suburbia."

Stahl told Trump, "You said the other day to suburban women, 'Will you please like me? Please?" She used a pleading tone of voice in repeating Trump's comment.Trump responded, "Oh, I didn't say that. You know, that's so misleading the way -- I say jokingly, 'Suburban women, you should love me because I'm giving you security. And I got rid of the worst regulation.'" He repeated that he had made the comment "kiddingly," not as if he was "begging."

After Stahl asked Trump if he wants to lock up former President Barack Obama, Trump said in the extended footage, "No, I don't wanna lock him up, but he spied on my campaign. Obama and Biden spied on my campaign."

to try to maintain the fantasy of a continuous England that could absorb within it wildly different cultures. What she relied upon was the West. The Englishmen who caused so much devastation around the world did not bring any miracles with them; they brought only bloodshed and cruelty and plunder, the same forces that had ruled the world since the beginning.

But by the time of Elizabeth’s reign, England understood itself as a Western nation, identifiable by its commitment to individual rights, equality, and self-determination. These values created the free world, and to the very limited extent that a Queen can stand for them—the Queen of a country with such a terrible imperial history—she was determined to do so.

Weak, selfish, petulant Charles?

Elizabeth spoke of Englishness and its enduring character, not of racial composition or traditional custom. She—of all people—said England’s greatness wasn’t in its past. It lies in its present and its future.

now this whole delicate operation of creating a Britain in which the old and the new don’t merely coexist, or inform each other, but are together part of a cohesive narrative of greatness, in which the monarch is both the defender of the Church of England and the symbolic leader of a country with 3 million Muslims—all of this has fallen to … Charles?

she often acknowledged how Britain was changing, never once disparaged it, and found within it a plausible case for continuity. What she did was locate—or possibly create—a unifying culture of Englishness as defined by the values of the Blitz: courage, calm, resolve.

This is not an era of reconciliation and bygones being bygones. This is an era of reparations. A lot of people around the world don’t want to “celebrate diversity,” a concept wholly born of the dying West. They want their treasures back, and they know where to find them.

Most of them were stolen, and in the most sadistic way possible. Will Charles—Boomer Zero—be able to keep hold not merely of the things but of the idea of England that his mother helped create?Doubtful.

this is the key part—people did not accept the reasonable expectations. They fought and organized and worked. They bent the curve of the future.

now is no time for celebration. To use a World War II analogy, we’ve survived Dunkirk, the Blitz and Pearl Harbor—but much damage has been done, the enemies of liberalism remain formidable, and we’ve only just begun the effort to regain ground. Even if victory is possible, there is a long and difficult road ahead.

Perhaps Churchill’s 1941 Christmas Eve address from the White House, where he was visiting Roosevelt, is apt.

“Let the children have their night of fun and laughter,” he remarked. And “Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasure.”But Churchill added that, after sharing that moment of pleasure, we will have to “turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”